Book Manuscript Workshop: ‘Economic Statecraft’

Lunch will be provided to those who have registered.

Centre for International Studies (CIS) Sponsored Book Workshop

If you would like to attend this event please register by emailing Barnaby King (barnaby.king@tss.ox.ac.uk). Draft chapters of the manuscript will be sent, in advance of the event, to those that confirm they are attending.

On Friday 20th October, the Centre for International Studies (CIS) will host a book manuscript workshop on Professor Cécile Fabre’s book-in-progress ‘Economic Statecraft’. Lunch will be provided.

Abstract:
Economic statecraft is an important tool of foreign policy. Its main instruments are economic sanctions, aid conditionality, loan conditionality, and debt forgiveness. It is used as a means for political actors to position themselves on the world stage by signaling what their foreign policy aims are; it is also used to force or induce a change in other political actors’ conduct and thus in the status quo, or on the contrary to deter those actors from changing the status quo. Like war, it is often coercive – and certainly harmful. Unlike war, however, it has not received systematic treatment at the hands of moral and political philosophers. My aim, in this book, is to start filling that gap. To state the book’s central thesis: Political actors such as states, coalitions of states, and international organizations are morally entitled, on behalf of their individual members, to resort to economic sanctions and conditional aid, but only as a means to protect human rights, and so long as the harms which they thereby inflict on the targets of those measures are not out of proportion to the goods they bring about. Moreover, they are morally entitled, on behalf of their individual members, to resort to conditional lending and conditional debt forgiveness, not just with a view to protect human rights, but also to pursue non-wrongful larger political goals – under certain conditions.

Professor Cécile Fabre is a political philosopher, and currently Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She is also Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Nuffield College, Oxford. She has just completed an 8 year long project on the ethics of war and peace and is currently working on a research project on the ethics of foreign policy.